Week#12- The Benefits of Teaching the ECC in Collaboration

    It's extremely easy as a TVI to fall into the trap of thinking that you must teach the Expanded Core Curriculum as the Lone Ranger. Most of the time our job is done independently and it's especially so if you're an itinerant teacher traveling from school to school. Usually, we are the only professionals with full knowledge of the extent of the impact a visual impairment has on the student living with it. The issue of getting all of the ECC goals and objectives effectively covered doesn't have to fall entirely on the TVI. In many cases, given the shortage of TVIs, collaboration with the student's parents and the educational team as a whole is the best approach to making sure that these skills transfer into the real-world needs of the student. Collaboration is the best way to avoid the ECC skills becoming disjointed from the overall educational needs of the student. When done well, the ECC skills enhance the student's ability to thrive in life in spite of the lack of visual input.

   When I worked as the vision resource room teacher at a school for students with exceptional needs, collaboration was everything. Our students were dealing with so many exceptional needs that affected every aspect of their lives, it was necessary to work together to get the best possible progress. Life skills, (as they were called at that time), were the majority of the goals and objectives on the IEPs. I am talking about helping students that needed guidance with assistive technology, simple career skills, money management, cooking skills, as well as, basic feeding skills, dressing skills, and hygiene skills. When the educational team met, it included a large number of therapists, and it was necessary for the health and safety of these medically fragile students to understand the full measure of what we were dealing with. In some cases, it was life or death for the student in understanding not only the extent of the student's visual impairment but for example, if your student had a seizure disorder, it was necessary to understand signs of an upcoming seizure event and triggers.

    It was necessary for all of us to understand the impact of each exceptionality upon each one of our goals and objectives. I distinctly remember working closely with the speech-language pathologists to help one particular student with retinopathy of prematurity utilize an adaptive speech-language device. This student was wheelchair-bound, so we needed to make sure that wherever the device was attached on her tray, it was within her field of vision for her to optimize the device's features. Each of us had a different goal and objective for the student's use of the device because it was a huge part of empowering the student in her educational environment. However, the goals and objectives worked together to help the student increase her ability to utilize the device efficiently.

   Later on, when I became an itinerant TVI, collaboration with the educational team members helped my students to carry over their vision skills to other areas of their education. For example, keyboarding skills that I taught to my student, would be encouraged by the classroom teacher so that the student could keep up with general education demands. I made it a point to not allow myself to become an island and frequently communicated with other teachers and professionals working with my students in order to assure that whatever goal and objective I was working towards with the student was helping that student to make progress in other areas of his/her education. It's not easy when you're already strapped for time, but it is necessary in order to assure the overall progress of the student.